Museum Future Predictions

The Centre for the Future of Musuems made five predictions about the museum of the future. They said Green, Personalised, Comfortable, Interactive and Flexible. Read the article to get the explanation of each one (especially “Interactive”. They means something a bit more advanced. I think a better word would have been something from the Nina Simon lexicon “Participatory”)

I pretty much agree with these predictions, so I would like to offer five of my own.

I predict the museum of the future will be:

1) Closed. As in the doors are shut and the staff laid off. Whilst the financial and business world are slowly recalibrating themselves to try to deal with the new systems in places, I imagine there are a great number of museums that just will not have the ability to adapt for whatever reason, or the reasons will be out of their hands.

2) Enslaved. I think this to be the best antonym for autonomous. What I mean is that there will be ever increasing influences or a museum program from outside the museum. Corporate sponsorship of exhibitions, oppressive criteria for funding, government social engineering agendas and media lynch-mobs of ignorance. The actual museum will be very few decision left to make.

3) 3D digital. A more positive one. It only makes sense that the current digitisation projects will move into the next phase and an extra dimension. Considering there are people doing basic 3D scanning using only a webcam and other people doing amazing handheld highly-detailed scanning, museums are going to have to start soon.

Autodesk University 2009: Z Corp from Core77 on Vimeo.

4) Sillier. I agree with the CFM’s statement that future museums will be Flexible, but I feel that’s a statement about requirement rather than actuality. Distributed sites and chameleon spaces are sensible suggestions but urban regeneration through the construction of massive monuments isn’t going to go out of fashion. Well, it’s not as long as our concept of a city doesn’t change too much. As nobody has a set idea about what a museum or art gallery has to look like, they can build ever more bizarre buildings in attempts to be iconic.

5) Curatorless. Celebrity curators (like Shaq rather than Koons) or tyranny-by-majority decision making processes to pick out favourites. I wouldn’t be surprised if the task of curators is outsourced either to voting schemes or freelancers. Those banks sitting on large art collections will probably have more need for curators anyway.

Those are my five. Anyone else want to come up with five of their own?

Google Goggles

I”ve been playing with the new Android app by Google called Goggles. The name’s a little daft and means I’m rereading every mention of it to make sure I haven’t confused the spelling.

I am very impressed with this. You take a picture, its gets scanned with something that looks like an edge-detect and it seraches results based upon that. This little video explains it.

Visual search technology. At last, we have something that could use all that effort we put into digitisation. It works too. Despite the limitations that they admit to, it’s really quite powerful. As a test, I took a rather blurry scan of a postcard of one of my favourite buildings, the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna. Top result was the Wikipedia page.

In a truely incredible feat that makes this even more relevant to museums, I scanned this postcard I picked up from the Imperial War Museum.

This somewhat staggered me. The top result it offered was this image from the London Transport Museum.

It had found the image I scanned inside another image hosted by a museum. The link took me to the artist’s biography.

At first, I was doubting some people’s claim that this was an augmented reality app. I could see how the technology could be used with other things and the “pointing at businesses” was a little thin, but I just saw a new form of Search. This is still a Google Labs product. Is it much of a jump to think that real-time video could be scanned/searched? Right now, we take a picture to be analysed. One day, we just need to stare at something for the revelant Google results to appear.

And in real-time, no doubt. Looks like we won’t be needing those QR codes after all. No wait, it scans those as well. And text. Amazing.

If there’s ever a time for museums to get their photography policy sorted, it’s right now. People will be wanting to scan stuff to get more information. Do you really want to deny that?

British Museum Advert on Korean Air Boeing

Via The Attic. Just leaving this here as opposed to delicious or tumblr. Great time lapse video that stirs up a lot of thoughts.

Nonprofitable Museum Actions

Museo Unite put the question out there.

Here’s the challenge: how can museums (and museos) make money enough to pay salaries while furthering their mission? “If you build it, they will come” is not working. We need to do more. Any ideas on how we can put the profit back in nonprofit?

Mission, as they rightly point out, means you can’t resort to opening cinemas. Getting people through the doors by any means is out of bounds. The museum mission has to be part of it.

If only it was that simple. There are plenty of other unspoken rules. Let’s say you have the opportunity to put on an exhibition that fits your museum’s mission/identity/policy and it has some real star quality to it. Win-win? Nope. You’ll gets all kinds of people crawling over you saying things like “conflict of interest” or “buddy-buddy”. I really feel for the New Museum. They have gone through some real unnecessary treatment. As if a trustee and supporter of a museum would take his resources to some other institution. Why would they want some other organisation to benefit? And why on Earth wouldn’t you want to work with people you’ve worked with before and have a close personal and professional relationship with?

Once upon a time, this kind of action was called an Art Movement

Also, we should be applauding Damien Hirst. I say that whilst not being his biggest fan. He paid money from his own pocket to keep an exhibition free and without having his name plastered next to some corporate logo.

“So museums need to start thinking more like for-profit businesses, right?” says Museo Unite’s Kat Hinkel. Of course there are hints to be taken from the commercial world, but be too much like it and you’ll will have people folding their arms in disgust. Contemporary artists? But they have agents and collectors! Public viewings would raise the prices! Scandal! Scandal!

The philanthropy-grantmaking model was unsustainable, as proved by it didn’t work in an economic meltdown. Well, the other option is go for international megaphilanthropy (via The Art Law Blog), which isn’t always an available option  and I don’t know how this exactly fits within a museum’s mission.

We just can’t win, can we? The required sweet-spot between financial stability, museum mission and corporate interest is a tiny speck surrounded by a lot of foot-stamping and indignation. Be aware when trying to answer the question, there’s a lot more to a nonprofit’s status than just the finance.

Manly Curating?

Wait… what?

So, the Arts of the Samurai exhibition at Met has an increased ratio of male viewers. Maybe because of the interest in a period in history when masculinity was measured upon the integrity of one’s code of honour and that this culture appeared almost on the other side of the world.

Apparently not. This guy seems to think it must be down to the swords and violence. He then goes to suggest future exhibitions on steak, explosion, guitars and naked women.

Is this a joke? Am I not getting this? Have I missed the point a bit? A lot of people are linking to this article and yet not commenting on it.

I’m pretty sure that if this was written by a woman who went on to suggest exhibitions like “Washing Up! A History Involving Dishcloths”, “Shoes – Have Another Pair” and “Keeping Your Man”, feminists and anyone with an ounce of respect for gender equality would be ripping this to shreds. Quite right too.

Tits, violence and meat. That’s how to get men into museums. Because that’s all men would care about. Not history, not craftsmanship, not other cultures, oh no. Did you not hear? The “Manly” demographic has devolved a few millions years and European paintings will probably make you gay.

Dear New York Times, if you’re allowing any old nonsense in your paper, I’m cheap and have a backlog of all kinds of things I can offer as articles.